Last week, I wrote about deciding on what to build next.
As luck would have it, a couple of days later, I stumbled upon a video titled “How To Record Your Entire Life In Apple Notes”. TL;DW: The video presents a concept called a “Forever Diary” and how to set it up in your notes app.
A Forever Diary kinda works like these 5-year-diaries, where you have one page for each day of the year. Every year, you just add another entry to that day’s respective page. This way, you always see, what you did 1, 2, … years ago on that day. And it hopefully makes you appreciate how far you’ve come.
But, since these journals are finite, you have to start over after 5 years. Wouldn’t it be great, if you could keep your journal, like, forever? That’s precisely what the Forever Diary does. Since it’s digital, you can start today and hopefully still add entries 50 years from now. How awesome would that be?
If you’ve read my “what should I build next”-post, you maybe recall that this isn’t exactly one of the ideas mentioned. But it comes close to idea number 3, the daily companion. The Forever Diary will be the successor to this, since the diary feature would’ve been a key part of the companion app anyway.
Why I’m building it
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
In the spirit of this Chinese proverb, I want to start building this diary as soon as possible, to start documenting my life. In a week, I’m going on vacation, so it would be great to have it ready by then.
Plus, I think it’s a good scope for an app to build in a couple of days while still being expandable in the future.
Features
The app will be pretty simple, you can just add an entry for each day, maybe rate your mood and add some tags (e.g., habit tracking). That’s it. And of course, you can see what you did on this day in other years.
It will also have an import (so I can upload the entries I wrote with Punkt some time ago) and export (so I can export and backup the entries) feature.
Since I don’t intend to implement E2E encryption from the get-go (just the built-in one from Laravel), I’ll mainly build this app for myself. At least for now.
That’s it, I will keep you up to date :)
What are your thoughts on this post?
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